Church of England (Women Bishops)

Simon Hughes Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) for leading the debate so well and to the Backbench Business Committee for choosing it.

I will declare my interests. I was baptised into the Church of England and confirmed into the Church in Wales—the latter makes me much more comfortable, because I support disestablishment. I am chair of a Church primary school, nominated by my diocese, Southwark, a trustee of a Church secondary school in my constituency and a member of the Ecclesiastical Committee in Parliament.

Like everybody who spoke immediately after the Synod’s decision, I despaired at the folly of the Church of England in making a huge public mistake. After so long, everybody was clear about the view of the Church as a whole. We have heard that 42 of the 44 dioceses are in favour of women bishops, and we have heard the view of the leadership, including Archbishop Rowan Williams, who did everything he could to ensure that the change was delivered during his time as Archbishop, for which we thank him.

I come from the evangelical tradition, and many evangelicals support the ordination of women as both priests and bishops. The situation is not one category in favour and another against. In the church to which I belong, St James in Bermondsey, which would be classed as an evangelical church, I do not think there is a single person who does not support the ordination of women as bishops.

Evangelicals look back to the scriptures, as does everybody else who gets involved in this argument. Although I understand why people have come to the view that they cannot accept that there can be women priests or bishops, that has very little biblical foundation. Nothing in my New Testament says that Christ set up a structure by saying, “You will have churches, and you will have deacons, priests and bishops, and they will all be men.” I may have missed something, but I have read the whole New Testament at one stage or another and there is nothing that says that. Although a tradition of having men has built up, some of the early leaders of the Church right from the beginning, when Christ was executed and rose again, were women. Indeed, in the early days some Churches had women bishops, for heaven’s sake. I do not understand why we are having to revisit this issue after so long.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I find myself agreeing with the right hon. Gentleman. It has always surprised me that women seemed to have a good, established position in the early Church, right up until it was legalised and then became the state religion of Rome. That leads me to feel that we should overturn the centuries of discrimination against women in the Church, possibly by disestablishing it. Maybe, once it is disestablished, it will be able to see a proper route to incorporating women as a proper and fundamental part of the Christian family.

[Simon Hughes]

The hon. Lady and I are on the same wavelength on that. I understand the arguments for establishment, but I believe that a radical Church should not be part of the establishment. We should be outside the establishment campaigning for Christian values, but we have ended up being in the establishment by accident. That is a debate for another time, and we will not resolve it today.

One paradox is that the established Church of England has decided not to have women bishops when the head of the Church of England, the supreme governor, is a woman. The whole thing is inconsistent. There is another anomaly in the argument that, because of the relatively recent history of the Church, only men can be priests, and that people want to be under the pastoral responsibility of a male bishop. The Church has provided that option in relation to priests, and it works. Now it has come up with a similar proposal for those who want a male bishop. It seems to me that if the first worked, the second is likely to work. I ask people to be generous and less suspicious and untrusting. It is understood that some people have a different view, and everybody has tried hugely hard to accommodate it.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I remember my wife, as a female Secretary of State, taking the present Bishop of London to see the Queen to present the bishop, who would not ordain women, to be head of the Church of England.

The right hon. Gentleman said that the Church of England decided not to have women bishops. The fair way to put it is that the Church of England Synod decided by a very large majority to have women bishops, and it is now a question of how and when, rather than rejecting that.

[Simon Hughes]

I agree.

I am clear that, in theory, there is no objection to women priests according to the Bible and Christian teaching. I am not a theologian, but the theology seems clear to me. However, it also seems to me that the Anglican Church has accepted women bishops all around the world. According to the information that I have, there are five Anglican provinces that already have women bishops, one of which has a woman presiding bishop—New Zealand and Polynesia, Australia, Canada, southern Africa and the United States. There is also the diocese of Cuba, which is not in any province.

A further 12 provinces have agreed that they can have women bishops and they are not, as it were, the usual suspects—Bangladesh, Brazil, central America, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, north India, the Philippines, Scotland, Sudan and Uganda. If I may say so, for heaven’s sake, if all those places have dealt with the theological argument and concluded that this is possible, then the Church of England is far from leading the Anglican communion; rather, it is following behind. There is a remaining group of provinces that have not yet accepted that they can have women bishops, but which have women priests, so they are clearly on the way. It therefore seems that many people in the Anglican communion have addressed this issue both in theory and theology and in practice.

Let me repeat what has been said strongly by others. My experience is that the Church has benefited enormously from allowing women into the ministry of the priesthood in the last 20 years, not just through their life experience, pastoral, academic and intellectual qualities and preaching ability, but simply through the sheer numbers. The right hon. Member for Exeter, who opened the debate, referred to that. At the moment, 20% of ministers in the Anglican Church are women. Across the Christian denominations in the UK, 20% is the average—the Methodists have 40%, but the average is 20%. In 2010—the last full year—more women than men were ordained as Anglicans into the priesthood for the first time. There are now 50% more women in the Church of England in full-time parochial appointments than 10 years ago. One in five of the paid clergy are women. All the evidence is that people are saying—from evangelicals to those in other parts of the Church, from women to men, from old to young—that they believe there should be women bishops in the Church.

The Church desperately needs more people willing to be its priests, its bishops and its leaders, to get out there and do the job of preaching and teaching. To say that women cannot be allowed any further than the first two rungs of the ladder—that they cannot be in the leadership—is ridiculous. It is to deny a pent-up opportunity that all of us who have watched women at work in the Church have seen—and I would not be forgiven if I did not say that among them is my wonderful sister-in-law, who is currently a chaplain for a hospice in Essex and who has served in the Chelmsford diocese for many years as a wonderful priest and member of the Church.

Let me refer to what we do now, because that is the question. I do not think we should take over the role of the Church of England now, not just because I believe in disestablishment, but because I think it would be inappropriate. I share the view of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field)—that we may however want to take control of what happens at the other end of this building in deciding who is admitted to represent the Church of England as bishops. It has long been anomalous that in the House of Lords—the Lords itself is anomalous—one bloc has to be all-male. That seems inappropriate.

Government and Parliament need to offer their best offices to the Church of England so that the new proposal—which the bishops mercifully have today announced they will make for Synod next year—can receive their support and technical advice and therefore pass both the Synod and this place. The bishops need to know in advance—I pay tribute to other colleagues on the Ecclesiastical Committee—that what they come up with will not be tripped up in Parliament, and we need to know in advance that it is compatible with our principles of equality, of which colleagues have spoken around the House.

The majority of people who go to church in this country are women. The leadership that the country calls for must include the majority of people in Britain, who are women. I hope the Church has learnt its lesson. I have every confidence in the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury-designate, who is coming to meet us tomorrow. I hope that by this time next year we will be celebrating not just the change in the Church’s rules, but the beginning of a transformation that will embolden the Church, improve it and increase the effectiveness of the ministry of the Church to proclaim the gospel to everybody, which is best done by everybody who is capable of doing it.